The limits on freedom of expression are tested in our democracy when we have to deal with hate speech. A thinker who faced the problem of those limitations was John Stuart Mill, who formulated what has been called “harm principle” in his On Liberty (1859), and according to which the only good reason to interfere with an individual’s liberty is to prevent harm to others. On these grounds, several authors have tried to reconstruct the category of “offense”, in order to (...) forbid varieties of conduct even though they do not cause harm to others. However On Liberty is a remarkable work in defense of liberty, even for those who want to refine their premises introducing elements that justify restrictions on freedom of expression. Certainly the weakness of Mill’s thought, at least one that help us to draw lessons for our democracies, appears only when we notice its flaws in light of a joint reading of On Liberty and Considerations On Representative Government (1861). This task points out an unjustified split between free speech and political participation rights, and one that would exclude certain individuals from citizenship indeed. (shrink)

We examine a variety of dialogue protocols, taking inspiration from two fields: natural language dialogue modelling and multiagent systems. In communicative interaction, one can identify different features that may increase the complexity of the dialogue structure. This motivates a hierarchy of abstract models for protocols that takes as a starting point protocols based on deterministic finite automata. From there, we proceed by looking at particular examples that justify either an enrichment or a restriction of the initial model.

Este ensayo recorre la historia de la mentira. Un curioso e interesante itinerario por distintas épocas en las que el engaño, el disimulo y la verdad manipulada describen el devenir y la cotidianeidad de las sociedades humanas. Desde el principio, la mentira se convierte en un acto social, por tanto en una práctica que se transforma con las modas y circunstancias históricas. El ser humano necesita de la verdad y de la ficción para vivir. Lo difícil es saber distinguir una (...) de otra sin perderse por el camino.This essay crosses the history of the lie. A curious and interesting itinerary in different epochs in which the deception, the dissimulation and the manipulated truth describe to develop and the ordinariness of the human societies. From the beginning, the lie turns into a social act, therefore into a practice that transforms with the modes and historical circumstances. The human being needs from the truth and from the fiction to live. The difficult thing is to be able to distinguish one of other one without getting lost for the way. (shrink)